This is fantastic. Scala 3 is a huge improvement, doing away with main of the pain points of Scala 2 and making using Scala effectively much more straightforward. I'm looking forward to getting to work with Dotty / Scala 3.
The Road to Scala 3
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Re: The Road to Scala 3
#32I love scala, and am very much looking forward to scala 3.
For all the complaints about the language that always pop up in these threads: yes, the language lets you shoot yourself in the foot (with great power comes people who don’t apply it responsibly), but it’s precisely that power that makes it so useful and exceptional when judiciously applied.
I like to say that scala is as if java and ruby had a love child and it all worked out. Unfortunately, that does mean that java people will feel it’s too fast & loose, and the ruby people will feel stymied by its static typing. But I just love that where other statically typed languages generally say “no”, scala says “well, I trust you know what you’re doing...”.
The only substantive tool complaint I have these days isn’t with compiler speed - it chugs through the codebase plenty fast - but with tool startup time. Hopefully the more recent java versions and maybe some native packaging will eventually help with that.
Re: The Road to Scala 3
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup being easy to understand without lacking functionality is definitely superior to supporting every insane programming concept. It builds stronger communities and better software
Big ol’ “Citation Needed” on this one. The flip-side here is that a language that doesn’t support basic programming language theory concepts dooms its users to repeat the mistakes of those who discovered them. I also would personally disagree that any statically types language without generic types and without non-nullability (e.g. `Option`/`Maybe` and `Result`/`Either`) is severely lacking in the ability to express…
proof is in the pudding on that one, sorry don't think there are academics studying this but it's an obvious outcome from the war that was Go/Scala/Node. Go is eating Scalas lunch because its easy to understand and communities are stronger than individuals. Sure Scala has more 'features' but Rob Pike would say every feature has a cost and you need to weigh that, didn't see that ever happen in Scala. Go is taking the time to get each piece right and I'm glad for it.
Re: The Road to Scala 3
#34The problem with scala is that the docs were too late to come. Those who put them out are geniuses (props Cats ppl, ZIO too) - but it seems it is now too late. You know there’s irony that alot of the earlier docs were based on haskell books, too. Its not the math. Look at haskell’s freenode presense vs scala’s. Scala’s a 6th of haskell. What haskell had over scala is docs and community. Scala was just too late, and m…
The problem with scala is that academic goals sometimes don't align too well with "industry needs".
Re: The Road to Scala 3
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Used to write scala, what a mess looking back on it now. Everyone I know that was writing it is now writing Go/Kotlin/Elixer
Sounds a bit like they just like to try out new languages.
Except they have all stuck with those languages, Scala was a disaster to maintain which is why you see companies fleeing from it.
Re: The Road to Scala 3
#36This is fantastic. Scala 3 is a huge improvement, doing away with main of the pain points of Scala 2 and making using Scala effectively much more straightforward. I'm looking forward to getting to work with Dotty / Scala 3.
I’m looking forward to reading new books on Dotty from underscore then :)
Re: The Road to Scala 3
#37When I gave up on Scala in 2016, I did so because its future looked fragmented and uncertain. Fast forward more than three years, and the first release of Scala 3 won’t be out until another year from now. Compare this with the pace of development of Go or Rust: those languages are driven by a vision, and have a dedicated team behind them. Scala is declining because no one could figure out for the longest time what wa…
> Scala is declining And the proof of this is... Where?
I'll speak for myself. I just jumped ship from a Scala team and took a pay hit to get out because it was so horrible. No one on the team had a strong command of the language, which made it worse. The application was a ball of mud. The week I left, proposals to rewrite everything in Java were heard. I took a position on a Go team and am much happier.
Re: The Road to Scala 3
#38When I gave up on Scala in 2016, I did so because its future looked fragmented and uncertain. Fast forward more than three years, and the first release of Scala 3 won’t be out until another year from now. Compare this with the pace of development of Go or Rust: those languages are driven by a vision, and have a dedicated team behind them. Scala is declining because no one could figure out for the longest time what wa…
> Scala is declining And the proof of this is... Where?
Sometimes you need no proof, just to look around well enough.
Not everything is a science paper.
Re: The Road to Scala 3
#39I see a lot of people complaining about Scala. I looked into it 9 years ago but it didn’t seem to be gaining traction so I stopped playing with it:
https://github.com/melling/scala
Recently, however, I’ve noticed that Scala does to be be quite alive (3.0, ScalaDays, Cats, Shapeless, Scala.js) so I’m taking another crack at it.
I’ve done a lot in Swift and it’s my current favorite language, but it’s not widely supported.
When I look at Scala (especially 3.x), I feel like it’s like a Swift++. Go is a great language but I want to move up a level of abstraction.
By the way, Scala 3 is now feature complete:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/edcenz/dotty_s...
Re: The Road to Scala 3
#40I love scala, and am very much looking forward to scala 3. For all the complaints about the language that always pop up in these threads: yes, the language lets you shoot yourself in the foot (with great power comes people who don’t apply it responsibly), but it’s precisely that power that makes it so useful and exceptional when judiciously applied. I like to say that scala is as if java and ruby had a love child and…
I appreciate you taking the courage to share your honest thoughts despite how they may conflict with the views of others here. My heart goes out to the people I overhear at work, the ones who are struggling the most, lamenting and complaining that tool X (In this case scala) is “so” embarrassingly awful and, with the implication that it’s to blame for their poor performance. That sentiment resembles some of the comments that I’ve written here and my heart really bleeds for them, because I know these people at work and I know that they’re struggling and I also know that they’re good, smart people, who have just fell into a trap of justification.
For what it’s worth, in my own journey learning Scala, I simply didn’t have the luxury to blame, and I just forced myself to try and figure out how other people, like the finagle team for example, could be so productive with such an obviously newfangled invention, until I realized… I was wrong.
Scala is actually a wonderful language! People move companies to continue working in Scala! In fact the ideas and lessons that I’ve learned from rethinking how I used to do things are so unfathomably valuable to me that I don’t think I will ever look at code the same way again.
And before you downvote me please don’t mistake my words for criticism. I truly empathize with how some of the people here may feel and I’m very happy to go into specifics if anyone requests that. I don’t write on HN a lot because a lot of times I think there is just this therapy - or a version of therapy - that amounts to people reinforcing their need to blame things in order to continue excusing the poor performance, and I don’t want to get caught up in it or be made to feel bad for encouraging others to reconsider their virtues.
And by the way we all, at times, have poor performance. (Anyway, I dictated this into my phone, so also excuse any weird words or punctuation. I love you all. Some typos were subsequently edited)